Dallas investment analyst John Mauldin warns savers in a new book that central banks are destroying wealth by printing way too much money.

The book, written with London-based analyst Jonathan Tepper, is called Code Red — a phrase borrowed from the Marines for a brutal punishment described in the 1992 film A Few Good Men.

In Mauldin’s book, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke takes the role of Col. Nathan Jessup, played in the movie by Jack Nicholson. “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!” Jessup roars on the witness stand.

It stretches the imagination to see Bernanke in the role. Mauldin’s point, however, is that Bernanke and his counterparts in Japan and Europe set the global economy up for another serious weakening to save it from the continuing damage of the 2008 credit disaster.

Under quantitative easing, or QE, the Fed has added $4 trillion to its balance sheets — buying government and mortgage bonds and parking them in the nation’s largest banks. This, the authors argue, amounts to running a supercharged printing press for the nation’s currency.

When debt becomes unmanageable, governments know they can whittle it down with inflation. U.S. households, companies, banks and the government were all deeply in debt when the 2008 financial crisis hit. So, too, were the governments of Japan and much of Europe. If everyone had spent the next several years paying off those debts, the global economy would be in a depression.

So, Mauldin and Tepper write, central banks chose to run the printing presses and let inflation reduce the debt burden.

As a result, they predict, savers will see the value of their holdings decline. Bubbles will form in stocks and in some types of real estate, like U.S. farmland. As more governments run the presses, currency wars will break out as each side tries to undercut the price of the others’ exports.

The book is well written, particularly its description of the desperation among economic policymakers in Japan who are trying to snuff out deflation while watching their population — and their productivity — decline.

At the moment, however, the fear seems overwrought.

Last week, the Federal Reserve announced it would taper its asset purchases beginning in January. If the economy stays healthy, Bernanke said, the Fed would stop QE by the end of 2014.

The U.S. dollar climbed, and gold prices fell.

Merrill Lynch analysts recently released a 2014 forecast that sees these trends continuing, with gold falling to $1,100 an ounce and oil prices weakening.

During the third quarter of this year, U.S. households resumed borrowing after five years of working down their debts. Household debt has fallen $1.4 trillion, or 11 percent, since its peak in 2008.

The U.S. government deficit, meanwhile, has fallen from 10 percent of gross domestic product to 4 percent, and it is heading for 3 percent.

Throughout the Fed’s QE efforts, inflation has been low. The Consumer Price Index has dwindled below 1 percent this year.

Mauldin and Tepper wrote with much of this contrary evidence in mind. They rebut the low inflation data by questioning the accuracy of the Consumer Price Index and by noting that all the new money put into banks by the Fed won’t become inflationary until the banks lend it and put it into circulation.

The full title of Mauldin and Tepper’s book is Code Red: How to Protect Your Savings From the Coming Crisis.